Movements at the fiscal/monetary crossroads
I recently published a research article in the Journal of Urban Affairs with the amazing Akira Drake Rodriguez. The paper is called "Movements at the fiscal/monetary crossroads: Financing a Green New Deal for schools in Philadelphia." For this week's post, I'm sending a link to the paper and the first two sections. Below is our short summary and introduction, so if you think it's interesting please read and send me comments!
And here's a podcast Akira and I just did with FreshEd, hosted by Will Brehm, that gets to some of the main points.
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Short summary
Philadelphia’s schools suffer from an astounding $4.5 billion infrastructure backlog, resulting in toxic school buildings that threaten the lives of predominantly low-income, nonwhite students, teachers, staff, and community members. To combat this issue amidst the ongoing climate crisis, movement groups have demanded policies that would both fix Philadelphia’s schools and reduce building emissions. During their work, a question regarding financing emerged among organizers and researchers: should green infrastructure updates to urban school buildings be financed primarily through grants or loans? In this paper, we use a critical resource theory in education framework to articulate the contours of this question using two organizing campaigns as case studies. We find that there are trade-offs between legislative logjam and the immorality of indebtedness at this impasse.
Introduction
On July 13, 2022, a Philadelphia teacher and organizer breathed a sigh of relief: the school district facilities department had installed an air conditioning in his classroom at Robeson High School. Despite temperatures rising to historical levels in the city, attributable to and publicly understood as resulting from climate change, it had not been easy to win this small demand. It took a year of teacher, student, parent, and staff organizing to pressure the district, necessitating the creation of several committees, testimony at school board hearings, a rally with prominent elected officials, and a direct action targeting the district central office where students, teachers, staff, and parents marched and delivered petitions demanding the installation of air conditioning.
Relenting under movement pressure, district officials met with the organizers, telling them there were grant monies available and they could move Robeson to the top of the list of schools receiving upgrades. The American Rescue Plan’s infusion of federal grants for educational purposes buoyed their budgets of course, devoting $325 million of extra revenues to facilities. The squeaky wheel got the grease in Robeson’s case, but the list to which the officials referred is long: Philadelphia’s school buildings have $4.5 billion in deferred maintenance (Backer, Citation2022). Recently, district’s finance chief admitted in an interview that by 2025, the district would be in a deficit (Mezzacappa, Citation2022), trying to pay its debt service on bonds for capital expenditures like the facilities issues plaguing Robeson and its other dilapidated schools. The school district’s most recent $360 million bond, a portion of which was devoted to green purposes, had a relatively high 5% interest rate and $262,376.20 cost of issuance. One wonders whether the teacher and his colleagues might target the municipal bond market for their next campaign, lobbying for lower cost loans with less punitive interest rates, should a ceiling cave in or asbestos get into the air, as is common in the city’s buildings (Whitmer, Citation2020; Windle, Citation2018).
A week later, this question about fiscal versus monetary targets and working class demands came up in a book review focusing on the Federal Reserve. Cooper (Citation2022) took up the tension between fiscal and monetary policy in the context of radical organizing. Reviewing Petrou’s The Engine of Inequality, she provocatively asked whether and how movements can succeed “without some sense of how to collectivize the process of money and debt creation?” Continuing with a novel juxtaposition of the language of revolution with questions of fiscal and monetary policy, she noted that “any radical challenge to capitalism today would also need to seize the means of money creation, collective spending, and taxation.” She ends with clarion call to “develop our own politics of collective finance.” Cooper’s is one of a growing number of voices concerned with the tension between fiscal and monetary policy in U.S. domestic left organizing (Block & Hocket, Citation2022), particularly when it comes to climate finance (Farooqui & Sahay, Citation2021; Gabor, Citation2021; Hockett & Omarova, Citation2017; Taiwo & Bigger, Citation2022).
This paper takes on two questions in urban climate finance. First, what does it look like when we re-center movements as the agents of urban climate finance, particularly in the case of Philadelphia’s public schools (see Robin Citation2022 and the introduction to this special issue)? And second, which path makes the most sense for such movements to take when making urban climate finance demands: a big green (public) state or big green (private) finance, as Gabor (Citation2021) has parsed them? To find instruments and policies that work for people living in cities rather than against them (see the recent case of Jackson, Mississippi’s water crisis (Ponder, Citation2021) proposals might come from movements on the ground like the one led by the teacher and his colleagues in Philadelphia. Yet Cooper’s question remains: should these movements craft their proposals and demands using models of fiscal redistribution or models of debt and money creation? Movements face a dilemma here, which we call the fiscal/monetary crossroads. In this paper, we recount two movements organizing for transformative green urban infrastructure for Philadelphia’s public schools. The campaigns we examine made distinct choices when confronting the fiscal/monetary crossroads, one taking the fiscal route while the other took the monetary route. After providing background on the situation of Philadelphia’s schools, we reconstruct the steps organizers took and the results of their efforts, drawing conclusions from these narratives for the wider question of whether finance can address actually-existing material needs and demands for urban climate action using critical resource theory, a nascent framework emerging out of research applying critical race theory, critical theory, and dependency theory to public education finance.